It’s not just “Manchester England, England.” If you think what happened in Blighty can’t happen here — 19 killed, 59 injured — you’ll have to excuse me if I say “You’re out of your bloomin’ mind.” Did you already forget 9/11/2001? Or the Boston Marathon? Or San Bernardino? Or the Orlando gay bar attack less than a year ago that killed 49?
Oh, yeah. Seems so long ago, doesn’t it, even that last one? The “new normal.” We put these things out of our minds the week after to deal with the next trivial Washington scandal or go about our petty lives. Our culture lives in a self-destructive willful blindness, refusing to see the obvious even though it happens again and again across the globe. Radical Islam, Islamism, or whatever you want to call it has been at war with us since the Twin Towers came down and even well before. And they have no intention whatsoever of stopping.
Nevertheless we respond in the most perfunctory manner, nattering on about how Islam is a”religion of peace,” criticizing ourselves and others for “Islamophobia,” or dismissing it all as a police matter.
But this time it was teenage girls — our children — in that Manchester audience, murdered by a suicide bomber. If he had been more successful gaining entry, he might have killed several hundreds of them instead of, at this writing, only 19.
Have we learned anything? Is this finally going to be enough? Will we at last wake up? You tell me that the next time you drop your young daughter off at a rock concert you’re going to feel comfortable. Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, libertarian, or ladeedah, you’re going to have heart palpitations, I promise you.
Politicians blather on about how these terrorists are “cowards.” No, they’re not. Nothing cowardly about killing yourself for your vision of god, insane as it might be. What they are is maniacally evil, the same kind of evil that marched innocents into gas chambers in the 1940s. If you don’t confront it, it goes on and on, just as happened then.
So what do we do about it?
Begin with this:
Ban the word “Islamophobia” from the English language. It’s the biggest lie of our time, invented to distract from the obvious truth: Islam has a monumental problem with the modern world that affects all of us. Egypt’s al-Sisi knows it. Saudi King Salman seems now to know it. Only the “useful idiots” in the Western left deny this blatant reality. ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their ilk are the clear perpetrators, but the so-called liberals and progressives — in their endless morally narcissistic virtue signaling — are their enablers, actually their unindicted co-conspirators. It’s time we should indict them.
They keep repeating we shouldn’t tar all Muslims with this unconscionable murderous violence. Well, we shouldn’t. But if even ten percent of Muslims are accepting of violent jihadism, that’s ten percent of a billion and a half people, roughly four times the population of California and twice as big as all of France. Want to dismiss that as mere Islamophobia? You’re only contributing to its growth. And to the deaths of your children.
Time to end this PC masquerade, which is a license to kill in disguise. Not all religions are the same, at least in their present forms. Buddhists aren’t blowing up teenagers in Manchester.
Also, time to get behind President Trump’s new initiative to enlist the Islamic world in their own reform. It’s high time an American president did that. Bush didn’t have the courage and Obama refused to believe there was a problem. He thought we were the problem — incredible, actually delusional, as that is in retrospect.
Politicians and the media particularly must face reality. We may not like it but we are at war. You should behave accordingly. This is Topic A — and there is no Topic B until further notice… that is unless you want Manchester actually to be the “new normal.” It pretty much is already. How horrible is that for all of us, how horrible for our children. Why don’t we all get together and put an end to it? It’s even more important than impeaching Trump.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. He tweets @rogerlsimon.
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